Integrating Levittown: How One Family Started A Housing Revolution

Daisy Myers pours coffee for her husband, Bill, in their new home in Levittown, Pa.

Photo by Sam Myers/Associated Press/File 1957

August 13, 1957, — Buck County, PA, The American Dream is supposedly to own your own home in the community of your choice and raise your children while having backyard barbeques with the neighbors. On this day in 1957 William and Daisey Meyers decided to try and buy their part of the dream but as African Americans, they faced bitter resentment and threats from some Whites in the community.

The Meyers had been looking for a new home. They wanted some place of peace, quiet with relative safety to raise their children. The post-war housing boom of the late 1940s and the 1950s introduced new terms to the American lexicon, Levittown and Suburb and suburbia. Levittown was because the first mass builder was William Levitt. He built the first of his developments on Long Island, New York in 1947 and was completing his second in Bucks County.

The problem for the Meyers was that Levittowns were segregated communities, expressly built for White people. The reason for this has some historical controversy. Some people insist that Levitt was himself a bigot, although he swore that as a Jew, he knew prejudice and was not himself a bigot. That said he had to block sales due to his contract with the federal government. However, he took the sympathetic racist view that his customer base of Whites would not buy if there were Negros present.

Government contracts did specify that he as the developer could not sell to African Americans. The Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration had subsidized the building of these suburban developments with regulations that stated no new homes could be sold to Negroes.

The language was for, “New Homes” The Meyers were able to get around this unreasonable law by agreeing to purchase the home from Bea and Lew Wechsler, a Jewish couple from the Bronx. The Wechslers were civil rights activists who saw an opportunity to upend the quiet racism of the federal government and William Levitt. So, on this day the papers were signed to buy the home.

The Meyers began to move in on August 19^th and were met with shock by their new neighbors. Some of whom stood around outside the home and shouted, “Nigger Get Out.” A couple of days later a mailman asked who owned the house and Daisy Meyers told him she did and this was the correct address he started running down the street yelling, “It's true, It's true the Niggers are here!”

Over the next few weeks, the harassment escalated. Stones were thrown through windows. Mobs stood outside shouting insults and demanding the Meyers leave. The mob also targeted the Wechslers for selling the Meyers house. Soon many of the Whites in the community got together and formed the “Levittown Betterment Committee” to organize the threatening phone calls and other protests. They rented a home on the same street which was renamed the “Confederate House.” At this location the Confederate flag was flown and “Dixie” was played on loudspeakers.

When these somewhat subdued threats didn’t force the Meyers out some locals stepped it up and defaced the house with spray paint. One neighbor painted, “Not OKKK,” on the side of his home. Another walked by nightly with his black dog, whom he had named “Nigger” and yelled often. Soon crosses were burned outside the Meyers and Wechsler’s homes.

These overt measures were against a court order that no more than three people were allowed to congregate. Finally, after two weeks outside pressure forced the local and state police to intervene to stop the near riot activity that was happening every evening. Thanks to allies like the Quakers, the American Jewish Congress, and the William Penn Center as well as friendly and supportive White neighbors word had spread throughout the nation of the treatment of this family.

After three months in their new home, Pennsylvania Attorney General Thomas McBride filed a complaint against the Levittown Betterment Committee and the Confederate House. The complaint read that the Confederate House and Betterment Committee had, “entered into an unlawful, malicious and evil conspiracy . . . to force the said Myers family to leave Levittown: to harass, annoy, intimidate, silence and deprive of their rights to peaceable enjoyment of their property.” With the help of local and state police patrols what had so quickly blown up seemed to blow over.

The Meyers lived in their Levittown home for four years and a second African American family the Mosby’s moved into the Bucks County Levittown a year after the Meyers. This was the beginning of legal change challenges to the historic racism in housing. After the Meyers made national news. Broad enforcement of President Truman’s Housing Act of 1949 started with the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration refusing to subsidize William Levitt’s next developments. He sued and the case went to the New Jersey Supreme Court where Levitt lost and the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Until he died William Levitt swore that his segregation policy was entirely economic even with the court loss and several boycotts and protests led by the NAACP and other civil rights groups.

Bill Meyers died in 1987 at the age of 65. Daisey Meyers became known as the “Rosa Parks of the North.” And wrote a biography, Sticks'N Stones: The Myers Family in Levittown, published in 2005. She spent 30 years teaching for the New York City School District. All her life she was active in multiple community groups. Daisy Meyers died in 2011 at age 86  Bea Wechsler also died in 2011 at age 91 and Lew Wechsler is still living at age 105, he wrote his own memoir in 2005 The First Stone: A Memoir of the Racial Integration of Levittown, Pennsylvania

Sources:

https://jewishcurrents.org/remembering-the-battle-to-integrate-levittown

https://www.witnessingyork.com/mapping-meaning/daisy-myers-sticks-n-stones-but-words-will-never-harm-you/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-02/how-the-federal-government-built-white-suburbia

https://web.archive.org/web/20160412090421/http://www.nosue.org/civil-rights/integrating-levittown-1957/

 

Failed Lynching Leads To Creation Of Ultimate Sundown Town

The Tribune — Seymour, Indiana — Aug. 15, 1903

August 12, 1903, ~ Whitesboro, Texas. This East Texas cotton farming town has a history of terrible treatment of its Black residents. Beginning with the birth of the city itself. A Black man named Robert Diamond settled the area in the early 1800s and the settlement of “Wolfpath” but this is ignored by most historians. A hotel in the settlement and the Butterfield Overland Mail route called this route, the Diamond Route. This changed in 1848 when Captain Ambrose B. White and his family settled in Wolfpath. White had been in the army in the frontier Indian wars in Illinois. White had come from Illinois with a few other families and Wolfpath changed first to White’s Colony. The area remained fairly isolated due to the heavy forests of the area until the Civil War, although White had built the Westview Inn as a stage stop and supplied horses to the Butterfield line.

In 1860 a formal post office was built and the town was incorporated as Whitesborough and was primarily a Texas frontier town. In the next few years, the city grew as a farming and timber community and in 1879 was added to a train line running to the county seat of Dennison Texas, at that time the town was renamed Whitesboro. Like all areas of Texas and the South during Reconstruction and Jim Crow lynching was an agreed-upon way of dealing with African Americans that the White citizens found troublesome. Whitesboro was no different in, 1885 in the nearby town of Bells, Texas a Black man named John Martin was hung. In 1901 a man named Abe Wilder was brutally lynched and burned to death in Sherman. Today, Whitesboro, Bells, Sherman, and Dennison are included in the same metropolitan area.

Racial tensions were always running high in Grayson County and in 1903 someone tried to ignite a race war by placing notes in very public spots in Whitesboro and Sherman that stated the “Anti-White Mans Club” was going to kill a white girl to avenge Wilder and poison several of the wells owned or used by Whites. The person who posted the notes was never found, and while it is believed to be a sign of things to come there was barely in mention of this in the local papers.

On Aug 12th a Black man named Jonas Brown was arrested for an assault on a “Mrs. Hart”. There was no reporting on what this assault was if it was a rape or robbery or what. Other reports say he hadn’t touched her but frightened her near a barn and she ran screaming. Regardless, by 8:30 pm that night though a mob of several hundred men had come to the jail and broke Brown out and beat him and then took him to hang from a local elm tree.

After this, the mob left the scene and the sheriff and his deputies came to collect the body. Amazingly Brown had survived, the sheriff quickly cut him down and they rushed him to the jail in Sherman. During the evening the mob remained busy though and posted warnings to all Blacks in Whitesboro to leave town or die. Soon the rumors that Brown survived and had been taken by the sheriff and the violence began. White men broke into Black homes forcing out residents and burning the house down. By morning Blacks had begun fleeing town by taking the train or running into the wilderness, then north or west. For the next four days, armed White men patrolled the streets looking for Black residents. Those they found were tied to a hitching post. On the morning of Aug 15, White men savagely whipped 17 men for ignoring the order to leave town. All Black residents in Whitesboro and the immediate vicinity had fled, there were none left.

The sheriff and county attorney had requested aid to restore order and U.S. Marshalls and officers from Sherman and Dennison headed to Whitesboro to restore legal order. However, this did not mean any former Black resident felt safe to return.

The creation of one of the ultimate Sundown Towns had taken place in the four days since the attempted murder of Jonas Brown. No one was ever arrested for that attempted murder, and no one was arrested for the whippings of the 17 other men or the burning of Black homes. Angry Whites in town had successfully removed the Negro from their environment.

This remained the case for decades in the census. In 2020 of the 4,074 residents of Whitesboro only 33 were African American, or less than 1 percent of the population. 

Sources:

The Lynching That Led To Billie Holiday's Iconic Song "Strange Fruit"

 

Photo By Lawrence Beitler, 1930. Fair Use Image

August 7, 1930, Marion Indiana ─ A White mob attacked the Grant County Courthouse tonight intent on murder. They were reacting to the arrests of three Black teens for the alleged shooting of White man Claude Deeter and raping his fiancée Mary Ball the night before. Deeter died at the hospital from his gunshot wounds early this morning.

Grant County Sheriff Jacob Campbell had arrested the three African American men that afternoon and had them in jail. By evening word of both the murder of Deeter and the Rape of Ball had spread throughout the county and surrounding communities and White men started coming into town. Many of them had worked with Deeter in the neighboring town of Fairmount. By late evening there appeared to be 1,000 people on the courthouse lawn, and they were in a frenzy.

Although Indiana was a northern state it was no better than most Southern states during the Jim Crow era. There were some 250 “Sundown Towns” in Indiana a reflection of deep-seated racism. In fact, just a few years earlier the state was the power base for the Ku Klux Klan, In 1925 the Klan held most of the political power in the state and had 250,000 members. Although by 1930 the Klan had lost much of that power it wasn’t due to an epiphany by the population regarding their Negro neighbors but a reaction to being affiliated with Grand Dragon David Curtis Stephenson. Stephenson had been convicted of the abduction, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a state education official in 1925.

The Sundown Towns then were just a natural outcome of the persistent prejudice in Indiana. The Sundown Town designation was a community where law enforcement and town government agreed on laws to remove anyone who was black (and in many cases Jews Greeks and other Eastern or Southern Europeans) from the town. The core of this White mob seemed to come from the factory town of Fairmount where they had supposedly worked with Deeter, Fairmount was a Sundown Town. The Fairmount crowd was full of White Supremacists.

The lynching of Blacks wasn’t unusual in Indiana either with 21 previous lynchings in the state, so there was fertile ground for racial violence by the night of August 7, 1930.

Word had spread to Indianapolis and Fort Wayne that there would be a hanging that night and apparently, people wanted to be there for the spectacle. By 8:30 that night, the crowd on the lawn was estimated to be more than 5,000 people.

Realizing the intent of some in the crown Sheriff Campbell and all his men stayed at the jail to protect the three Black men in lock up. The crowd did not know that Ball had recanted when asked to identify the men. While the rape of a White woman was probably an even greater reason for a lynching than murder by this time it wouldn’t have mattered the mob was heated and looking for blood.

At 8:30 pm about 20 White men rushed the jail and attempted to break out the men. The sheriff and his men repelled them with tear gas and warning shots.  Word then went out and soon crowbars and sledgehammers were shared, and 200 men attacked the jail breaking down the wall. Thomas Shipp was then pulled free and passed to the mob. Shipp started screaming his innocence as the mob beat him and dragged him to a tree where they strung him up. Abram Smith was taken out of jail the same way. Smith fought back and at one point was able to remove the noose but the crowd further beat him and broke both his arms. 

Then, the mob pulled James Cameron out and took him to the same offending tree, however, someone in the crowd called out, “Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or killing.” And stunningly the mob released Cameron to the sheriff.

It is believed that both Shipp and Smith were already dead from the savage beating when the mob strung them up from the tree. Some members of the crowd still had not gotten their fill of blood and murder and tried to rally the full crowd to invade the Negro section of Marion and force out the population and burn it to the ground. The arrival of additional police from Indianapolis, Muncie, and Fort Wayne put that idea to rest, as well as the National Guard having been ordered by the governor.

On Aug. 9^th a press conference was held, and it was announced that the Sheriff and the Marion Police Chief, two assistant state attorney generals, and Grant County prosecutor would be opening an inquiry to try and find individuals responsible. Also, Flossie Bailey, local NAACP director in Marion, and Indiana Attorney General James M. Ogden worked to gain indictments, but they soon found a conspiracy of silence. The grand jury refused to examine the testimony and brought no charges. 

Survivor James Cameron did go on trial and was convicted for participating in the killing of Claude Deeter and spent four years in prison. At twenty-one, He left prison determined, "to pick up the loose threads of my life, weave them into something beautiful, worthwhile and God-like.” He went on to become an important Civil Rights activist in Indiana. He founded four NAACP chapters and worked for voting rights. His memoir, “A Time of Terror: A Survivor's Story” was published in 1982. Then in 1988, he founded America’s Black Holocaust Museum. He was pardoned by the state of Indiana in 1991 for his participation in the Deeter murder.

James Cameron’s life was not the only legacy of these murders. Lawrence Beitler's iconic photograph of the two swaying bodies sold several 1,000 times in the next week until the police stopped the sale. Beitle's photograph inspired Abel Meeropol, pseudonym Lewis Allan, to write the poem “Bitter Fruit” which he later put to music and renamed “Strange Fruit” which became the signature song of Billie Holiday and has been covered by Nina Simone, UB40, Annie Lennox and others. Strange Fruit became the anthem for the anti-lynching movement and an important part of the Civil Rights movement.

 

Sources:

https://www.abhmuseum.org/an-iconic-lynching-in-the-north/

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/lynching-thomas-shipp-abram-smith-1930/

https://www.abhmuseum.org/about/dr-cameron-founder-lynching-survivor/

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/marion-indiana-lynching-1930/

https://justice.tougaloo.edu/location/indiana/